Anima

I bawled my eyes out! So did my wife. There is always more than meets the eye (and ear) with both PT Anderson and Thom, and this truly is a masterpiece fitting of their filmographies. Knowing a bit about Mr Yorke and what he has been through in the last few years can make for some supremely heart breaking stuff, and Anima is just about the most perfect love letter ever written. This is art, real art 😭

It's PTA and Thom Yorke. I mean what else could you possibly ask for??? Not to mention Prague.....

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master) and with music written and performed by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Anima is hard to describe. Calling it simply a music video is an understatement. It is more than a visual promotion for a song, with the visual aspects have as much, if not more, of a meaning than the music. Besides it's 15 minutes long!

The finished product is interesting and reasonably entertaining. Not brilliant or compelling, but not a bad way to spend 15 minutes.

What do you get when you combine the music of Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the imagery of Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread, Magnolia) with choreography by Damien Jalet (Suspiria)? You get one hell of a visual treat that blows your senses away.

Set in a dystopian world where a tired and disheveled Thom Yorke is joined in a choreograph of movements by other fellow passengers on a train. There he catches the eye of a fellow passenger and thus begins his long lost journey to get to her.

Three songs from Yorke's new album, ANIMA, are combined to create this spellbinding fifteen minutes, with the camera angles capturing the inventive and unique choreography perfectly. The set design and art direction are effective thanks to the cinematography, And Yorke does give a fine performance, with his twitching eye stealing the show!

Although its exploration of the dystopian societies is nothing new, ANIMA is a fairly entertaining, and occasionally disturbing, hypnotic treat for the senses.

(8/10)